A little more than twelve months in the past at the Nevada Grand Prix, the Cadillac racing team were ultimately granted the official approval as the world of Formula One's newest entry for 2026. Building the team from the ground up has involved a frenetic pace of work that the team principal, Graeme Lowdon, has likened to the Apollo program. As F1 arrives on Vegas this weekend, the team are aware the deadline is approaching.
The Tight Timeline to Australia
At the last event of the campaign to be staged in the United States, with just over three months to go before they hit the circuit for the first time in Melbourne at the 2026 opener, the Cadillac F1 project have advanced rapidly but, in what must seem like a monumental task, they are aware there will not be sufficient time.
The technical director, Nick Chester, became part of the nascent team in the spring of 2023 shortly after it was established, when the squad were without even an approved entry. He has been at its core since then and enjoys a wry smile when thinking about the ride.
“You might get five minutes looking back at what you have accomplished and think: ‘Incredible, what an achievement what we’ve done in less than three years,’” he notes. “Then the following moment you realize: ‘Yeah, we still have a significant amount to do.’”
A Unique Task
The CTO achieved victories at the Renault team in Fernando Alonso’s championship-winning years of 2005/2006 and was in control of engineering strategy at the new Mercedes Formula E team, but no other project has been quite like the task of introducing the all-American Cadillac name, a factory team backed by the parent company, General Motors, into the pinnacle of motorsport.
“Building an Formula One team from nothing, when are you ever going to get a chance to do that?” he says. “It is like nothing else. In an well-set team you don’t get the opportunity to transform cultural approach.”
With every day that goes by focus are increasingly concentrated on the looming decisive point in the Australian GP and goals are being handled.
“You have to assume that a brand-new squad coming in is going to be last but simply getting on to the grid will be an achievement in itself,” Lowdon stated recently and while the CTO shared this view he believed the organization had a statement to make as well.
“The initial objective we aim to demonstrate is that we deserve to be there,” he emphasizes. “So we show up and we operate well. We seek to prove that we’re a proper team doing the right things on the race track. When we’ve shown that our credentials are solid, then we aim to demonstrate improvement from there on.”
Racing Talent and Recruitment Effort
In late summer they recruited Sergio Pérez and Valtteri Bottas as their racers for the 2026 season, a tandem remarkable for their vast knowledge in operating at the front in two of the sport’s biggest teams, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes-AMG, and the Finnish driver reflected the attitude of combative optimism.
“Certainly, we are pragmatic,” Bottas stated. “There’s going to be a huge amount of work to do, and we expect probably a challenging beginning, because this is Formula One. But our goal isn't to stay at the back. In my view given this organization, with this team, these people, it's entirely possible we can't manage to advance swiftly to a competitive level and taste victory.”
To achieve that goal hiring has been in full swing, with staff now up to in excess of 400 and scheduled to hit the target of 600 swiftly. Alongside their existing facility at Silverstone, the organization are in the process of building an headquarters at Fishers in Indianapolis and there is the GM works in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they are constructing the plant to build the new engine, scheduled for 2029 – until then they will use Ferrari engines – and the Toyota wind tunnel in Germany. It is a sophisticated structure, at odds with the trend in F1 for increased consolidation, and has led to the fresh organizational mindset to which Nick Chester referred to.
NASA Blueprint
“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo program,” remarked the team principal shortly before the British Grand Prix in mid-season. “We’re realistic, we understand how difficult it is. The timelines, are incredibly tight. Alright, we aren't launching a lunar mission, but it feels like it sometimes.”
So they have embraced, as opposed to the conventional chain of command, a non-hierarchical approach similar to that of the space agency's, where there were a range of Apollo teams all focusing on various components of the mission in a multiple sites.
“In a system where you follow a process where a challenge emerges and they escalate it to their manager, that manager talks to a leader at a different location, it travels back down, it’s super slow,” says the CTO. “Therefore we enable people to handle things directly. Moving away from managerial sign-off for everything is much smoother and more rapid.”
The Future
The success of this agile methodology will be proven in the pressure of racing next season and there is a considerable amount at stake for Formula One, too. The Cadillac team have signed as their development driver the emerging American Colton Herta
